In his recent study of the events of September 11, 2001,
Slavoj Žižek argues that the spectacle surrounding
this act of terror is best understood not as an intrusion
of the Real within the fantastic sphere of postmodernity,
but rather its inverse:

[I]t was before the WTC collapse that
we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World horrors
as something which was not actually part of our Social
reality, as something which existed (for us) as a spectral
apparition on the (TV) screen—and what happened
on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition
entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our
image; the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e.
the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience
as reality). (16)

This intrusion of the fantasy upon reality—this spectacle
that ruptures our previous assumptions about the externality
of the suffering world—collapses the space that had
previously separated Americans from the global consequences
of American hegemony. What is most unsettling about this
collapse is that it reveals how the Other—the elusive
adversary that has, at long last, been revealed to us—is
actually internal to the broader dynamic that Western interests
have set in motion. The same mujahadeen that the
U.S. sponsored in the late 1970 as anti-Soviet freedom
fighters have now turned against us, and yet they
remain part of us in a fundamental way. Žižek
identifies them as an instance of the excess of U.S. state
power, the necessary outcome of that powers intervention
abroad. Moreover, this dynamic is in no way restricted to
military power, but also manifests itself within the broader
cultural dynamic of neoliberalism. The so-called Free Trade
Zones found throughout Asia and Latin America, with their
factories exploiting cheap, unprotected labor, also manifest
themselves as the necessary concrete excess
of the postmodern information economy.

The intricate relationship between
postmodernity and its vicious underbelly becomes particularly
apparent when we look at a text such as Bret Easton Ellis
1999 book, Glamorama. In many ways, this work prophetically
situates terror as contiguous with or even internal to postmodern
culture. It prefigures the horrific spectacle of an act
of terror manifesting itself as the return of the repressed,
the blowback resulting from postmodern excess.
In doing so, Glamorama also dramatically envisions
the traumatic suspension of the Real that accompanies the
moment of terror, the violent cut that ruptures our sense
of reality. It is this representation of trauma that I will
set in relation to the ontology of rupture central to the
aesthetic of drum and bass.

The protagonist of Glamorama, Victor Ward, is a
New York model and socialite whose caustic cynicism is only
rivalled by his absolute reverence for the cult of celebrity.
Halfway through the book, an anonymous agent diverts Victor
from his work in opening a trendy nightclub, in order to
send him to find a colleague modelling in London. Upon locating
her, Victor finds himself among an uber-glamorous
circle of models all at the apex of stardom.

It is therefore all the more unsettling when Victor suddenly
stumbles upon these same models engaging in the systematic
torture and murder of a teenager who turns out to be the
son of a Korean diplomat. From this moment on—this
shocking act, unprecedented in the narrative—the protagonist
experiences the detached, noncommital moral relativity of
the world of fashion and celebrities in lockstep with the
randomness of terrorism. The two, in fact, come to seem
integrally related: it is precisely the fact that postmodern
culture enables signifiers to float free of ethical or material
constraints that guarantees the moral abyss out of which
these acts of terror emerge.

We should not shrink from the outlandish conclusions
about postmodern society that Ellis presents in his novel.
Ellis
presents the supermodels acts of terror as internal
to Western society, as acts perpetrated by those located
at the center of Western culture. It
may be tempting to create a clear distinction between
Elliss
fictional acts and the horrific acts of terror that have
been unleashed recently in Istanbul, Bali, and New York,
acts attributed to a group, Al-Quaida, that is often situated
in opposition to Western culture.11
However, this kind of thinking may be anachronistic. Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest in their recent work Empire
that there may no longer be an outside to the
hegemonic influence of capital, that the entirety of global
society may be subsumed under the diffuse network system
that they refer to as Empire.
By this logic, fundamentalist Islam cannot be seen as some
archaic holdover from the seventh century, but is itself
a dynamic bound up with the exigencies of late-20th-century
culture.12
If Elliss book does not anticipate the specific source
of the real-life attacks, it implicates postmodernity
in
the emergence of contemporary terror in a highly unsettling
fashion.

Music organizes time, enabling humans to experience even
the most radical occurences of temporal rupture as embodied
feeling, and it is in this sense that I see drum and bass
responding to the kind of cultural moment depicted in a
narrative such as Glamorama. As an example of how
such sensibilities manifest themselves in the practice of
drum and bass, I would like to briefly take a look at the
track This is Los Angeles, produced by the UK
producer Lemon D. The track opens innocently enough, with
a steady if rapid breakbeat groove. Lemon D eventually layers
in a looped melodic sample that combines the wa-wa guitar
and synth typical of an early-1970s funk record. This element—which
is recognizable as the kind of G-funk reference we might
hear in an old Ice Cube tune—is punctuated with an
ominous sample of Tom Brokaw intoning, This is Los
Angeles, gang capital of the nation, a sample culled
from his 1992 coverage of the Rodney King riots. Thus far,
Lemon D is giving us a relatively stable, if unsettling
dance track.

It is only after this groove is well-established that
he introduces a gesture of sufficient power to break this
narrative wide open. In an unprecedented move, Lemon D suddenly
drops the melodic layers, leaving us with an ominous drum
roll that builds as the sound of circling police helicopters
looms overhead. As the drum roll is cresting, we hear Brokaw
asking in a paternalistic tone, lets see if
theres anything that can be done about all of this.
The ensuing sub-bass drop punctuates the musical texture
with a forcefulness that is at once thrilling and terrifying.
It is a gesture that resembles nothing that we have encountered
thus far in the track: even the drum roll leading up to
it, with its clear trajectory, does not anticipate the sheer
overwhelming volume of these bass drops. It is this kind
of moment that most insistently links drum and bass to the
idea of the sublime, and that most powerfully reveals the
element of terror implicit within the sublime. [Listen
to Lemon D, This is Los Angeles] One of the
most effective aspects of electronic music is that the technology
used to produce it allows artists to explore the most extreme
reaches of frequency and intensity. This is a capacity that
drum and bass artists such as Lemon D, Dillinja, Ed Rush,
Optical and others harness in the service of a disturbing
level of sonic violence, an aural analogue of the destructive
power of contemporary technology.

Lemon D channels the explosive violence released in the
sub-bass gesture into the breakbeat that follows, cutting
and splicing this sampled groove in such a way that the
loud snare fragments almost completely undermine our sense
of a steady 4/4 beat. Alongside the brutal impact of the
sub-bass accents, the ricocheting snares have the effect
of temporally ripping the ground out from under us. It is
only after extended listening that we begin to see patterns
emerge: the bass notes occur at regular intervals, giving
us a scaffolding for what seems like the spontaneously improvised
turbulence of the sampled snare fragments. We begin to see
that there is in fact a broader, systemic permanence underlying
this turbulence.

The percussive impact of this climactic moment in This
is Los Angeles couldnt be clearer. However,
the implied source of this violence is much more ambiguous:
what is this sonic fury supposed to represent? The cops
that beat Rodney King? The uprising that followed those
cops exoneration? The crackdown on gang violence?
Tom Brokaw himself? On the one hand, the rigorous, gridlike
framework that organizes these gestures suggests the top-down
imposition of power that characterizes the state. However,
the exuberant polyrhythmic density of this new section,
coupled with its basis in sampled funk breakbeats and the
Jeep beats of the bass drops, suggests that
African-Americans themselves are being placed at the center
of Lemon Ds narrative. By this reckoning, the musical
surge midway through This is Los Angeles could
be interpreted as the aural analogue to black insurgency.
In any event, the ambiguity of this gesture reveals something
of the unsettling power of drum and bass: Lemon D strips
away all external, semantic reference points—G-funk
keyboards, sampled helicopters, television announcers—concentrating
the musical energy in a gesture that eschews referants in
favor of violence itself, the radical ontology of rupture
expressed in aural form.

Situated within the broader historical context, Lemon
D—a UK producer, working on this track in 1995—is
responding to a specific moment in postindustrial life,
experienced perhaps most visibly in a community such as
South Central L.A., but in fact not unrelated to similar
social trends in Thatcher-era working-class London. The
narrative of the Rodney King disturbances articulates broader
lessons for late capitalist culture. The weight of the state,
in the form of the LAPD, being brought down on South Central
in a frenzy of military strength that could only be labeled
sublime had the unanticipated effect of generating a widespread
social upheaval that would eventually result in a broader
moment of cultural trauma. The undertone of menace that
pervades Lemon Ds This is Los Angeles,
consummated in its thundering moment of rupture, articulates
the inevitable consequences of the society of affluence,
a society that is prepared to sublimate its social inequities
in order to sustain the affluence of the few. The purpose
of drum and bass is to make such systemic upheavals embodied
as predictable, even in their radical unpredictability;
this music urges us to be vigilant in the face of the constant
possibility of danger.

The
defensive postindustrial posture of This is Los Angeles
also gestures towards a broader context for this music,
one grounded in the Afrodiasporic nexus that Paul Gilroy
refers to as the Black Atlantic. In the same moment that
the track foregrounds the immediate crisis of the L.A. uprisings,
it implicitly draws a connection back to its own East London
context, highlighting the commonalties that link black communities
in post-Reagan L.A. to black and working class communities
in post-Thatcher London. Lemon D, a black British producer,
is taking up a genre that sits at the crossroads of American
hip-hop, British techno (a genre imported from urban Detroit),
and the Jamaican sound system culture that Caribbean immigrants
brought to cities such as Bristol and London in the postwar
period. This music of drum and bass draws its energy from
a notion of culture grounded, if anywhere, in mobility,
migration and dynamism, in routes rather than
roots.

Paul Gilroy has argued that the experience of migration
has an especially powerful cultural resonance in Afrodiasporic
cultures as a result of the networks of movement and travel
that have constituted the societies of the black Atlantic
since at least the beginning of slavery several centuries
ago. For Gilroy, every voluntary movement taken on by Afrodiasporic
peoples bears the traces of earlier movements that were
in many instances wholly involuntary: much of the social
identity of black populations in the wake of modernity has
been constituted by the cultural memory of the slave ships,
of the traumatic events of the Middle Passage. Against this
backdrop, drum and bass producers, DJs and dancers, all
of them participants in cultures constituted through migration,
can be seen as intensifying aesthetic impulses—rupture,
break, discontinuity—which gained a considerable part
of their cultural resonance from this legacy of upheaval.
The fury and vertiginous instability that courses through
This is Los Angeles resonates well beyond the
tracks immediate subject, binding together aggrieved
communities of color across national and historical boundaries.

However, if This is Los Angeles dramatizes
the impact of a mass insurgency, a spontaneous uprising
against the abuse of state power, its unprecedented fury
gestures towards the more unsettling situation in which
we now find ourselves: devastating acts against the state
need no longer be based in mass action. Drum and bass anticipates
the paranoiac worldview necessary in the age of asymmetrical
warfare, an age in which our own technological infrastructure
is turned against us. Earlier in my discussion, I argued
that the contemporary technologies of music production—MIDI
sequencing, digital sampling, and so forth—take up
the cyborg relation between body and machine, where such
technologies serve as extensions of individual subjectivity.
One of the more disturbing aspects of this relationship
in the context of electronic music is that a lone producer,
armed only with a modest bedroom studio, is capable of unleashing
a sonic tempest completely out of proportion to his or her
own scale as an individual. When a particularly extreme
artist such as Ed Rush claims that he wants to hurt
people with my beats, he is articulating the fundamental
asymmetry of power that exists between the producer and
the dancefloor. In the dance music environment, the consequences
of this asymmetry may be little more than hearing loss and
a certain residual jittery paranoia. Nevertheless, this
asymmetry translates into an aural analogue of something
far more sinister. It emulates the devastating—and
largely inscrutable—process that manifests itself
within the sublime act of terror.

It is worth considering what this dimension of electronic
music production—its metaphoric proximity to asymmetrical
warfare—might suggest about the relationship between
drum and bass and a utopian/dystopian imaginary. In
his conclusion to the well-known essay The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter
Benjamin takes note of the obscene pleasure that 20th-century
humanity finds in the spectacle of destruction or atrocity:

Mankind, which in Homers time was an object
of contemplation for the Olympic gods, now is one for
itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree
that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of
politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. (242)

For Benjamin, this aestheticization of destruction is not
simply an isolated phenomenon, but participates in the political
economy that sustains the status quo. Earlier on, he writes,

Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of
todays technical resources while maintaining the
property system. … If the natural utilization of
productive forces is impeded by the property system, the
increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources
of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and
this is found in war. (241–2)

If capitalism generates technological innovations that might
ultimately encourage a collective vision of utopia, undermining
the property system, the device of war enables this excess
in productive forces to be taken up in the service of sustaining
this system. The aestheticization of violence participates
in this economy at a symbolic level, offering up the spectacle
of destruction as a distraction from existing inequities.
In this sense, we might see the explosive
musical force of drum and bass—its aesthetic codification
of traumatic rupture and militaristic individualism—as
a device that participates in our cultures postponement
of a critical engagement with late capitalism.13

However, also implicit in Benjamins formulation
is a vision of technology as a repository of utopian hope.
The same productive excess that manifests itself in spectacles
of destruction also gestures towards the utopian promise
of technical innovation itself. As an aesthetic mobilization
of this productive excess, the bleak wakeup call of drum
and bass bears within itself the possibility of a more utopian
world. In the expansion of the mind (and body) that derives
from the experience of the sublime lies the potential for
additional strength, for critical awareness. In its pairing
of mechanistic rigor with neurotic, fragmentary rhythms,
the works of this genre constitute their own self-critique.
In the end, the hermeneutics of suspicion inspired by drum
and bass might help to foster a conscious world-view in
which we are ready for the contingencies to come.

11. For example, in
Samuel P. Huntingtons influential text Islam
is positioned as the absolute antipode to the West,
its values ostensibly the product of a process completely
distinct from the evolution of Western culture.

12. A fair bit of evidence
points to this interpretation. It is possible to interpret
a number of events in the Islam world since the Iranian Islamic
Revolution as some fundamental response to modernization,
Western imperialism, or the encroachment of globalization.
The clerical fatwa against Salmun Rushdie, the two
Palestinian intifadas, the rise of the Taliban—each
of these seems as driven by supposedly external
events as through any internal logic. Slavoj Žižek
argues that, far from constituting the threat of an unrelated,
external Other to the West, Islamist terror may
be wholly intrinsic to late capitalism: …are not
international terrorist organizations the obscene
double of the big multinational corporations  the ultimate
rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, albeit with no clear territorial
base? Are they not the form in which nationalist or religious
fundamentalism accommodated itself to global capitalism?
(38). Indeed, this form is often quite recognizable to us.
A recent article by Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic Monthly
argues that Osama bin Ladens operational methods may
most closely resemble the dynamics of venture capital: bin
Laden doesnt dictate projects from above, but rather
gives the go-ahead to projects that are proposed to him, in
the manner of an investment firm green-lighting
a new Internet startup.

13. I am grateful to
an anonymous reader for drawing attention to this element
of Benjamins argument.